Howard Mumford Jones

SOURCE: "The Anti-Image," in O Strange New World: American Culture: the Formative Years, The Viking Press, 1964, pp. 35-70.

In the following essay, Jones examines the opposing idealized and terrifying visions of the New World that characterized Renaissance thought.

The concept that the New World is the peculiar abode of felicity lingered for centuries in the European imagination and, like the youth of America, is one of its oldest traditions. Virginia, wrote Michael Drayton in his famous poem of 1606, is earth's "onely paradise," and Goethe not long before his death declared: "Amerika, du hast es besser/Als unser Continent, das Alte. " As for France, the studies of Gilbert Chinard have shown the connection between America and an exotic dream of difference and perfection. The vitality of the idea runs so deep and long, the traditional image can be adapted to humor, so that William Byrd's...